Moreover, Volvo will be a partner with Nvidia,
becoming the first to use the Nvidia Drive PX 2, Huang
announced.

As you may guess from that introduction, the
Drive PX 2, upgraded from
last year's first model, is designed to be the on-board
supercomputer that helps self-driving cars navigate the roads —
and get better over time, using buzzy
deep-learning technology.

In other words, this would be the "brain" that lets self-driving
cars, self-drive.

To do that, it needs to be really, ridiculously
powerful.And Huang says that this new
car supercomputer is up to the challenge.

"The computional capability of the Drive PX 2 is roughly the same
as 150 Macbook Pros," Huang says.

The Drive PX 2 has 12 CPU cores, capable of 8 teraflops of
processing power and 24 deep learning TOPS, Huang says. Don't
sweat the details, it's just industry jargon to say that it's
extremely powerful. Indeed, it needs liquid cooling just so it
doesn't overheat.

That's because "self-driving cars are hard," and need a lot of
data to safely ferry people around, Huang says. You need
exceptional processing power to "read" the road and make sure
that these self-driving cars get better the more mileage
they log.

The
Tegra X1, an electric car powered by Nvidia
technology.Renovo

The idea, proposed by Huang, is an "Internet of Cars," as each
Drive PX 2-equipped car would contribute its data back to a
mothership, that would help every other Nvidia-powered car learn
from the collective experience of the herd. Nvidia is calling
that mesh of self-improving "brains" the "Drivenet."

But this is right in Nvidia's wheelhouse: As a leading provider
of graphical hardware for gamers and researchers alike, Nvidia
has a lot of expertise in building systems that can make sense of
video input and make it something understandable by a
machine.